Articles about disasters & nature across every continent and era, oldest first.
Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh records a god-sent flood and Utnapishtim's boat on clay older than the Genesis account; Ziusudra and Atrahasis are older.
· 1800 BCIn AD 79 Vesuvius buried Pompeii under about 6 meters of ash, which sealed an ordinary Roman day whole, down to carbonized bread still in a bakery oven.
· AD 79Ancient DNA from graves dated 1338 near Lake Issyk-Kul, in what is now Kyrgyzstan, put the Black Death's source strain at the root of the plague family tree.
· 1347
